Black and grey elephant tattoo with a raised trunk, filled with mandala-style patterns, on the upper back between the shoulder blades.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental elephant on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A walking elephant with its trunk raised is outlined in bold black ink and filled with dense ornamental patterns of swirls, dots and scallops. Small areas of negative skin, including a heart-like motif on the body, break up the pattern. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a pale back, with dark hair visible at the top of the frame.

Blackwork Back Elephant Mandala Pattern Trunk Ornament Swirl

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and keep your hands off the embers. Now. Past the last oak on the Hollin road, where the trees stand so thick the light comes down green, there is a wall of ferns that my grandmother's grandmother swore was the edge of the world. Beyond it lived an elephant, and she was the only creature in that forest ever to be painted.

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Nobody in Cold Ashby had painted her. The potter's girl, Marit, did it the summer her brother went to sea and never wrote. Every evening she sat on the stile with a pot of ochre and a bramble stick, and every evening she drew one more swirl on the grey beast who came down to drink at the pond. Dots for the rain. Scallops for the bread they didn't have that winter. A small clean heart on the flank, left bare on purpose, so the elephant would have somewhere to keep the thing Marit couldn't say.

Autumn came, and the pattern grew until the elephant looked like a hillside of lace. One night she lifted her trunk high and walked out of the trees, down the lane, past the shuttered mill, and stopped beneath Marit's window. The village woke to a sound like a bell rung underwater. Marit ran out in her nightdress. The elephant bent her great head and touched the bare heart with the tip of her trunk, and every line Marit had ever drawn came loose and drifted up into the dark like smoke.

Now, what did the village do? Nothing, my loves, because there was nothing left to do. The next spring Marit's brother walked up the lane, brown as a conker and laughing, and said he'd seen an elephant on the coast road with a pattern down her back exactly like the one Marit made. So you see, the paint goes where it's needed. Off to bed with you.